AFAIK, this whole “ban” is related to Adwords, not their organic listings. They don’t take gambling advertising now anyway, so to some extent, this whole issue is moot for our industry. I put “ban” in quotes because this is still speculative. (I haven’t personally heard this was actually happening from Google itself, and as far as I know it’s something that other people on message boards are saying they heard from Google, so it’s not confirmed, although IMO very possibly true.)
As far as whether or not it would affect someone who had a page reviewing a particular product, I don’t “think” that’s what the plan is. Overture doesn’t allow advertisers to buy traffic to send directly to an affiliate page either, and hasn’t for years. Google’s PPC program was the exception, not the rule.
Do a search for “insider slot secrets”. It’s an ebook with an affiliate program through Clickbank. If you look through the Google Ads, you’ll see that 7 of the 9 ads go to insiderslotsecrets.com. Those ads are actually all going to an affiliate page for the ebook. These people don’t actually have websites or pages built for the product; they’re sending traffic straight to their affiliate link.
It’s called arbitrage because they’re buying advertising from Google on a pay per click basis, and they’re immediately re-selling that traffic to the affiliate program, usually on a pay per sale or a rev share basis. In some cases, the pay per sale or the rev share will make them more money than they’re paying per click, so they make a profit.
I used to run an ad for a poker site on Google under certain keywords at less than 30 cents per click. I made over $1.20 per click in commission. So I was making 90 cents profit per click with no website. There was an inequity between the price of the advertising I was buying and what it was actually worth to the program, and I profited from the difference.
The idea behind this alleged ban is that from a user perspective, it’s probably not a good experience to search for something and see 7 ads that all lead to the identical page.
The term “arbitrage” is usually used to refer to people who buy and sell money at different exchange rates and make a profit. This sometimes happens. An example would be if you could buy one pound for one dollar. And suppose that you could buy 5 yen for a pound, and only 4 yen for a dollar. You could convert your money to pounds, then to yen, then back to dollars, and make a profit.
Didn’t mean to ramble…insomnia…